You're not bringing home one of Apple's newly released Mac Pro systems without spending a small fortune -- pricing starts at $2,999 for a quad-core model and $3,999 for a 6-core foundation, both of which are rocking dual graphics cards. There's some seriously powerful hardware inside these machines, but are they worth the asking price?

That's up to the buyer to decide, and to help answer that question, Macworld got its hands on an 8-core Intel Xeon E5 (3.0GHz) configuration and put the system through its paces. It also had 32GB of RAM, 512GB of flash storage, and dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics with 6GB of video memory per card.

As you might expect, this thing made easy-work out of Macworld's gamut of benchmarks. Its Speedmark 9 score of 312 bested all other Apple systems that came before it, including the second-place finisher, a 27-inch iMac quad-core 3.5GHz CTO configuration from late 2013 that scored 288.

"The 13 individual test results that make up Speedmark, show that the new Mac Pro really shined in processor-intensive tests like HandBrake encoding, the Cinebench CPU benchmark, MathematicaMark and Photoshop," Macworld noted.

Perhaps most impressive are the Final Cut Pro X benchmarks. The 8-core Mac Pro took just 15.8 seconds to import 60 seconds worth of 3840x2086 clips into a 4K project; it took 100.7 seconds for a 2012 model Mac Pro with a 6-core processor. Rendering and applying filters took the 8-core Mac Pro 39.1 seconds versus 154.4 seconds for year's Mac Pro.

We'll have our own in-depth review of Apple's new Mac Pro system soon, so if you haven't already, be sure to bookmark us and keep checking back!